I've spent good deal of time trying to fix this problem and concluded that the problem lies in the Zoran driver or hardware. I've tried, different audio cards, even different video cards DC10 and G400. From earlier posts, it seems the driver is not written very well and works fairly good only on certain types of hardware, the driver does not seem be able reseting Zoran codec on time when codec gets stuck doing hard compressing frames, such as snowy pics, fast moving pics and etc. Also it seems the driver works best on intel bx440 chipsets. I've tried, latency and other performance patches on kernel, and I was getting more problems with those and with stock kernel it works the best. Also I found out that the Marvel-g200/400 driver was written mostly by modifying incomplete driver(s) by copying/pasting from other codes and applying different patches, current driver(s) were written by many different people and still not finished. I've read lots of posts about Zoran codec and many developers find it very hard to writte driver for it, because hardware is not very well implemented.
If I'm correct and if I undenstood earlier posts, in general "audio ring buffer" message comes out when audio buffer gets filled up. It happens because video stream stalls on hard compressing frame for Zoran, so while Zoran is not responding the audio buffer gets filled up and you get that message.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian J. Murrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 1:54 PM
> To: MJPEG Users List
> Subject: Re: [Mjpeg-users] Error Audio ring buffer overflow
>
>
> On Wed, 2003-06-25 at 12:12, Brian Edmonds wrote:
> > Alan Murrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > > The error appears usually after around 20mins of
> recording, but will
> > > sometimes appear after 6mins, 11mins, etc.
> >
> > This sounds almost identical to the problem I've had with
> my DC10+ since
> > day one (back in January 2002).
>
> I occasionally get ring buffer overflows when recording from my Matrox
> Marvel.
>
> > I've never been able to record more
> > than 20min with it.
>
> For me it happens much rarer than that. I have some theories about it
> in my case however.
>
> > I've tried both ALSA and OSS drivers, multiple CVS
> > Zoran drivers and a few different 2.4 kernel releases.
>
> Can you try a 2.5 release? That would indicate that it's
> less likely to
> be simple kernel latency.
>
> I wonder if somebody who knows more could at least explain what the
> error means and give a brief technical summary of the process of
> capturing and how the audio ring buffer is involved in it all.
>
> I am really quite good at problem solving and a decent understanding
> about the general workings of the kernel but I have to understand the
> capture process first.
>
> How is this "audio ring buffer" used? How does it relate to the sound
> card?
>
> For the record, I believe the audio ring buffer overflows I
> get are due
> to latencies in the marvel linux driver. I suspect the latencies get
> really bad when the picture is noisy, like when it goes out of sync
> (i.e. from the source). I think the jpeg compressor gets
> tied up trying
> to compress that and does not give enough resources to the other parts
> of the capture process, overflowing the buffer of audio samples.
>
> As I write this I wonder if simply increasing the size of the
> audio ring
> buffer would solve some of these problems or would it just
> create other
> problems?
>
> b.
>
> --
> Brian J. Murrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
